Hiring senior people, hiring people with tenure at a really good place is just going to be hard. My hair gets worse, because there are no haircuts, so I had to cut my own hair. Much harder than fundamental physics, or complex systems. It wasn't until my first year as a postdoc at MIT when I went to a summer school and -- again, meeting people, talking to them. I'm not sure, but it was a story about string theory, and the search for the theory of everything. For example, Sean points out that publishing in more than one field only hurts your chance, because most people in charge of hiring resents breadth and want specializers. You can't get a non-tenured job. She loved the fact that I was good at science and wanted to do it. So, that's what I was supposed to do, and I think that I did it pretty well. The emphasis -- they had hired John Carlstrom, who was a genius at building radio telescopes. And the other thing was honestly just the fact that I showed interest in things other than writing physics research papers. So, that was with other graduate students. A response to Sean Carroll (Part One) Uncommon Descent", "Multiverse Theories Are Bad for Science", "Moving Naturalism Forward Sean Carroll", "What Happens When You Lock Scientists And Philosophers In A Room Together", "Science/Religion Debate Live-Streaming Today: Cosmic Variance", "The Great Debate: Has Science Refuted Religion? No preparation needed from me. (2003) was written with Vikram Duvvuri, Mark Trodden and Michael Turner. You sell tens of thousands of books if you're lucky. Doing as much as you could without the intimidating math. I can't quite see the full picture, otherwise I would, again, be famous. Sean, for my last question, looking forward, I want to reflect on your educational trajectory, and the very uncertain path from graduate school to postdoc, to postdoc to the University of Chicago. Like I said, we had hired great postdocs there. To the extent, to go back to our conversation about filling a niche on the faculty, what was that niche that you would be filling? We learned a lot is the answer, as it turns out. Again, stuff that has not been that useful to me, but I just loved it so much, as well as philosophy and literature classes at Harvard. What happened was there was a system whereby if you were a Harvard student you could take classes from MIT, get credit for them, no problem. His third act changed the Seahawks' trajectory. What were the faculty positions that were most compelling to you as you were considering them? This is something that is my task to sort of try to be good in a field which really does require a long attention span as someone who doesn't really have that. But I think that book will have an impact ten and twenty years from now because a new generation of undergraduate physics students will come in having read that, and they will take the foundations of quantum mechanics seriously in a way that my generation did not. Absolutely. I was a fan of science fiction, but not like a super fan. [39], His 2016 book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself develops the philosophy of poetic naturalism, the term he is credited with coining. I'll say it if you don't want to, but it's regarded as a very difficult textbook. I was like, okay, you don't have to believe the solar neutrino problem, but absolutely have to believe Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Would that be on that level? And the simplest way to do that is what's called the curvature scalar. But I have a conviction that understanding the answer to those questions, or at least appreciating that they are questions, will play a role -- again, could very easily play a role, because who knows, but could very easily play a role in understanding what we jokingly call the theory of everything, the fundamental nature of all the forces and the nature of space time itself. In fact, the short shield solution, the solution that you get in general relativity for spherically symmetric matter distribution, is exactly the same in this new theory as it was in general relativity. And honestly, in both cases, I could at least see a path to the answers involving the foundations of quantum mechanics, and how space time emerges from them. In 2012, he organized the workshop "Moving Naturalism Forward", which brought together scientists and philosophers to discuss issues associated with a naturalistic worldview. And I said, "Well, I did, and I worked it all out, and I thought it was not interesting." I want people to -- and this is why I think that it's perfectly okay in popular writing to talk about speculative ideas, not just ideas that have been well established. So, this was my second year at Santa Barbara, and I was only a two-year postdoc at Santa Barbara, so I thought, okay, I'll do that. He would learn it the night before and then teach it the next day. There are dualists, people who think there's the physical world and the non-physical world. I wrote papers that were hugely cited and very influential. The cosmologists couldn't care, but the philosophers think this paper I wrote is really important. Tenure Denial Sparks Protests at Chicago-Kent College of Law; Legal So, and it's good to be positive about the great things about science and academia and so forth, but then you can be blindsided. I thought it would be more likely that I'd be offered tenure early than to be rejected. In many ways, I could do better now if I rewrote it from scratch, but that always happens. [24] He also delivers public speeches as well as getting engaged in public debates in wide variety of topics. Honestly, here we're talking in the beginning of 2021. I think that, again, good fortune on my part, not good planning, but the internet came along at the right time for me to reach broader audiences in a good way. Seeing my name in the Physical Review just made me smile, and I kept finding interesting questions that I had the technological capability of answering, so I did that. So, I'm surrounded by friends who are supported by the Templeton Foundation, and that's fine. I thought that for the accelerated universe book, I could both do a good job of explaining the astronomy and the observations, but also highlight some of the theoretical implications, which no one has really done. This quick ascension is unique among academics at any college, but particularly rare for a Black professor at a predominately white institution. Again, a weird thing you really shouldn't do as a second-year graduate student. You feel like I've got to keep up because I don't do equations fast enough. By and large, this is a made-up position to exploit experienced post-docs by making them stay semi-permanently. The other thing, just to go back to this point that students were spoiled in the Harvard astronomy department, your thesis committee didn't just meet to defend your thesis. I think I talked on the phone with him when he offered me the job, but before then, I don't think I had met him. But the astronomy department, again, there were not faculty members doing early universe cosmology at Harvard, in either physics or astronomy. We can't justify theoretical cosmology on the basis that it's going to cure diseases. Oh, there aren't any? I think that I would never get hired by the KITP now, because they're much more into the specialties now. At Los Alamos, yes. I'm very happy with that. Another bad planning on my part. But the good news was I got to be at CERN when they announced it. That was my first choice. Well, I do, but not so much in the conventional theoretical physics realm, for a couple reasons. I get that all the time. Did you understand that was something you'd be able to do, and that was one of the attractions for you? Like I said, I wrote many papers that George was not a coauthor on. Professor Carolyn Chun has twice been denied tenure at the U.S. I have enormous respect for the people who do that. Bertrand Russell, on the philosophy side of things, did a wonderful job reaching to broad audiences and talking about a lot of things. But yeah, in fact, let me say a little bit extra. He began a podcast in 2018 called Mindscape, in which he interviews other experts and intellectuals coming from a variety of disciplines, including "[s]cience, society, philosophy, culture, arts and ideas" in general. So the bad news is. It might have been by K.C. Was that the game plan from day one for you? So, biologists think that I'm the boss, because in biology, the lab leader goes last in the author list. And, a university department is really one of the most exclusive clubs, in which a single dissent is enough to put the kibosh on an appointment! That hints that maybe the universe is flat, because otherwise it should have deviated a long, long time ago from being flat. It's challenging. Absolutely, and I feel very bad about that, because they're like, "Why haven't you worked on our paper?" But it's less important for a postdoc hire. They met with me, and it was a complete disaster, because they thought that what I was trying to do was to complain about not getting tenure and change their minds about it. An old idea from Einstein, and both Bill and I will happily tell you, when we were writing the paper, which was published in 1992, we were sure that the cosmological constant was zero. Carroll claimed BGV theorem does not imply the universe had a beginning. Doucoure had been frozen out of the first-team while Lampard was the manager and . Rather than telling other people they're stupid, be friendly, be likable, be openminded. The Hubble constant is famously related to the dark energy, because it's the current value of the Hubble constant where dark energy is just taking over. You have to say, what can we see in our telescopes or laboratories that would be surprising? Moving-tenure-denial - Chemical & Engineering News So, a lot of the reasons why my path has been sort of zig-zaggy and back and forth is because -- I guess, the two reasons are: number one, I didn't have great sources of advice, and number two, I wasn't very good at taking the advice when I got it. In 2012, he gathered a number of well-known academics from a variety of backgrounds for a three-day seminar titled "Moving Naturalism Forward". You know, look, I don't want to say the wisdom of lay people, or even the intelligence of lay people, because there's a lot of lay people out there. Well, most people got tenure. But the depth of Shepherd's accomplishments made his ascension to the professorial pinnacle undeniable. But I was like, no I don't want to take a nuclear physics lab. There were literally two people in my graduating class in the astronomy department. I'm on a contract. George Gamow, in theoretical physics, is a great example of someone who was very interdisciplinary and did work in biology as well as theoretical physics. It's the same for a whole bunch of different galaxies. They are clearly different in some sense. I wanted to live in a big metropolitan area where I could meet all sorts of people and do all sorts of different things. The obvious thing to do is to go out and count it. But we discovered in 1992, with the COBE satellite, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, and suddenly, cosmology came to life, but only if you're working on the cosmic microwave background, which I was not. And then they discovered the acceleration of the universe, and I was fine. What was he working on when you first met him? The American Institute of Physics, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, advances, promotes and serves the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity. Margaret Geller is a brilliant person, so it's not a comment on her, but just how hard it is to extrapolate that. I know the theme is that there's no grand plan, but did you intuit that this position would allow you the intellectual freedom to go way beyond your academic comfort home and to get more involved in outreach, do more in humanities, interact with all kinds of intellectuals that academic physicists never talk to. Like, you can be an economist talking about history or politics, or whatever, in a way that physicists just are not listened to in the same way. Could the equation of state parameter be less than minus one? They saw the writing on the wall. You should write a book, and the book you proposed is not that interesting. If everyone is a specialist, they hire more specialists, right? Anyone who's a planetary scientist is immediately interdisciplinary, because you can't be a planetary -- there's no discipline called planetary sciences that is very narrow. 1 Physics Ellipse Then, the other transparency was literally like -- I had five or six papers in my thesis, and I picked out one figure from every paper, and I put them in one piece of paper, Xeroxed it, made a slide out of it, put it on the projector, and said, "Are there any questions?" I'm close enough. If you've ever heard of the Big Rip, that's created by this phantom energy stuff. He points out that innovation, no matter how you measure it, whether it's in publications or patents or brilliant ideas, Nobel Prizes, it scales more than linearly with population density. I think that one year before my midterm, I blew it. To be perfectly honest, it's a teensy bit less prestigious than being on the teaching faculty. Yes, but it's not a very big one. Some of the papers we wrote were, again, very successful. Sean has a new book out called The Big Picture, where the topic is "On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself". Again, I was wrong over and over again. At the time, . Hiring managers will sometimes check to see how long a candidate typically stays with the organizations they have worked for. [So that] you don't get too far away that you don't know how to get back in? Sean put us right and from the rubble gave us our Super Bowl. But I still did -- I was not very good at -- sorry, let me back up yet again. And part of it was because no one told me. Partly, that was because I knew I'd written papers that were highly cited, and I contributed to the life of the department, and I had the highest teaching evaluations. And I think it's Allan Bloom who did The Closing of the American Mind. I was on the faculty committees when we hired people, and you would hear, more than once, people say, "It's just an assistant professor. I just thought whatever this entails, because I had no idea at the time, this is what I want to do. They claim that the universe is infinitely old but never reaches thermodynamic equilibrium as entropy increases continuously without limit due to the decreasing matter and energy density attributable to recurrent cosmic inflation. But I think, that it's often hard for professors to appreciate the difference between hiring a postdoc and hiring a faculty member. Almost none of my friends have this qualm. But I want to remove a little bit of the negative connotation from that. My father was the first person in his family to go to college, and he became a salesman. I don't know how public knowledge this is. So, that gave me a particular direction to move in, and the other direction was complex systems that I came increasingly interested in. Sean Carroll's Dishonesty: The Debate of 2014 And then I got an email from Mark Trodden, and he said, "Has anyone ever thought about adding one over R to the Lagrangian for gravity?" As far as I was concerned, the best part was we went to the International House of Pancakes after church every Sunday. Literally, it was -- you have to remember, for three years in a row, I'd been applying for faculty jobs and getting the brush off, and now, I would go to the APS meeting, American Physical Society meeting, and when I'd get back to my hotel, there'd be a message on my phone answering machine offering me jobs. He didn't know me from the MIT physics department. But you were. The Higgs, gravitational waves, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, these are all hugely important, Nobel-worthy discoveries, that did win the Nobel Prize, but also [were] ones we expected. We want to pick the most talented people who will find the most interesting things to work on whether or not that's what they're doing right now. So, I think that -- again, it got on the best seller list very briefly. Did Jim know you by reputation, or did you work with him prior to you getting to Santa Barbara? As a faculty member in a physics department, you only taught two of them. The unhappy result of preferring less candor is the loss we all feel now.". That was sort of when Mark and I had our most -- actually, I think that was when Mark and I first started working together. It's the path to achieving tenure. Well, and look, it's a very complicated situation, because a lot of it has to do with the current state of theoretical physics. I was a good teacher. It's very, very demanding, but it's more humanities-based overall as a university. So, it was really just a great place. By reputation only. What Is Time? | Professor Sean Carroll Explains Presentism and I thought it would be fun to do, but I took that in stride. Roughly speaking, I come from a long line of steel workers. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[16] and as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago until 2006 when he was denied tenure. Sean Carroll Podcast, Bio, Wiki, Wife, Books, Salary, And Net Worth I am a Research Professor of Physics at Caltech, where I have been since 2006. Amy Bishop and the Trauma of Tenure Denial | Psychology Today So, that was just a funny, amusing anecdote. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech, specializing in cosmology and quantum mechanics. Recent Books. Philosophical reflections on the nature of reality, and the origin of the universe, and things like that. It costs me money, but it's a goodwill gesture to them, and they appreciate it. Writing a book about the Higgs boson, I didn't really have any ideas to spread, so I said, "There are other people who are really experts on the Higgs boson who could do this." There are substance dualists, who think there's literally other stuff out there, whether it's God or angels or spirits, or whatever. This could be great. I learned afterward it was not at all easy, and she did not sail through. It could be very interdisciplinary in some ways. Tip: Search within this transcript using Ctrl+F or +F. And I do think that within the specific field of theoretical physics, the thing that I think I understand that my colleagues don't is the importance of the foundations of quantum mechanics to understanding quantum gravity. Also, by the way, some people don't deserve open mindedness. Sean Michael Carroll (born October 5, 1966) is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, . Part of the reason I was able to get as many listeners as I do is because I was early enough -- two and a half years ago, all of the big podcasters were already there. So, I did eventually get a postdoc. What academia asks of them is exactly what they want to provide. No, not really. The University of Chicago, which is right next to Fermilab, they have almost no particle physics. I remember Margaret Geller, who did the CFA redshift survey, when the idea of the slow and digital sky survey came along and it was going to do a million galaxies instead of a few thousand, her response was, "Why would you do that? In other words, if you held it in the same regard as the accelerating universe, perhaps you would have had to need your arm to be twisted to write this book. With that in mind, given your incredibly unique intellectual and career trajectory, I know there's no grand plan. Two, do so in a way which is not overly specialized, which brings together insights from different areas. So, I went to an astronomy department because the physics department didn't let me in, and other physics departments that I applied to elsewhere would have been happy to have me, but I didn't go there. You can skip that one, but the audience is still there. I don't think so. You can be surprised. I do have feelings about different people who have been chosen as directors of institutes and department chairs. Before he was denied tenure, Carroll says, he had received informal offers from other universities but had declined them because he was happy where he was . This is real physics. There's no real way I can convince myself that writing papers about the foundations of quantum mechanics, or the growth of complexity is going to make me a hot property on someone else's job market. So, I was done in 20 minutes. When I was very young, we went to church every Sunday. Carroll provides his perspective on why he did not achieve tenure there, and why his subsequent position at Caltech offered him the pleasure of collaborating with top-flight faculty members and graduate students, while allowing the flexibility to pursue his wide-ranging interests as a public intellectual involved in debates on philosophy . And I applied that to myself as well, but the only difference is the external people who I'm trying to overlap with are not necessarily my theoretical physics colleagues. So, just show that any of our theories are wrong. Carroll has been involved in numerous public debates and discussions with other academics and commentators. What would your academic identity, I guess, be on the faculty at the University of Chicago? So far so good. Maybe some goals come first, and some come after. Like I think it's more important to me at this point in my life to try my best to . What about minus 1.1? But those kind of big picture things, which there are little experiments here and there. What if inflation had happened at different speeds and different directions? Being surrounded by the best people was really, really important to me. By the strategy, it's sort of saving some of the more intimidating math until later. One of the things that the Santa Fe Institute tries to do is to be very, very tiny in terms of permanent faculty on-site. Did you connect with your father later in life? The world has changed a lot. But it was kind of overwhelming. It's a very small part of theoretical physics. So, they're philosophers mostly, some physicists. I have no problems with that. Alright, Sean. That's my secret weapon, that I can just write the papers I want to write. There were two that were especially good. That includes me. It felt unreal, 15 years of a successful academic career ending like that. theoretical physicist, I kept thinking about it. So, it's not hard to imagine there are good physical reasons why you shouldn't allow that. 4. It was mostly, almost exclusively, the former. That's a romance, that's not a reality. We wrote the paper, and it got published and everything, and it's never been cited. They can't convince their deans to hire you anymore, now that you're damaged goods. That is, the extent to which your embrace of being a public intellectual, and talking with people throughout all kinds of disciplines, and getting on the debate stage, and presenting and doing all of these things, the nature versus nurture question there is, would that have been your path no matter what academic track you took? It was really an amazing technological achievement that they could do that. So, happily, I was a postdoc at Santa Barbara from '96 to '99, and it was in 1998 that we discovered the acceleration of the universe. Then, okay, I get to talk about ancient Roman history on the podcast today. Intellectually, do you tend to segregate out your accomplishments as an academic scientist from your accomplishments as a public intellectual, or it is one big continuum for you? Benefits of tenure. As ever, he argues that we do have free will, but it's a compatibilist form of free will. It is remarkable. Who did you work with? My teachers let me do, like, a guest lecture. What was your thought process along those lines? Let me ask specifically, is your sense that you were more damaged goods because the culture at Chicago was one of promotion?
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